Stringed musical instruments such as guitars have evolved from their original hollow-body acoustic form; with the advent of electronic sound reinforcement, adaptive pickups were added, typically mounted on a strip extending across the round sound hole of the instrument. Electro-acoustic models were designed to be originally equipped with a built-in pickup but retaining the hollow body to provide substantial acoustic output. The "electric" guitar with a solid body and thus lacking any substantial acoustic output and instead relying on amplification, became immensely popular.
In the "electric" guitar, the solid body was often configured in a shape suggestive of the traditional guitar body but made somewhat smaller for weight balance considerations while functioning to provide the mounting arrangements for the pickup(s) and associated components such as volume and tone controls, and to provide weight balance.
This trend to a smaller instrument body found ultimate expression in the development of The Chapman Stick a.k.a. The Stick (R) (federally registered trademark) which is played in an independent two-handed string-tapping manner: the body was virtually eliminated by configuring the instrument as a through-neck structure carrying near the bridge end a compact pickup housing incorporating the associated electronic components such as tone and volume controls, mode switches, battery power supply, etc.
The resulting distinctively elegant elongated rectangular shape of the through-neck structure with the tuning mechanism appearing in the headstock at the upper end and the pickup/control housing extending diagonally as small protrusions just above the bridge at the lower end, is universally recognized and associated with the illustration shown in the company's federally registered logo trademark.
Typically in electric guitars the pickups and their associated components are mounted in a relatively permanent manner with little or no regard to ease of servicing and/or replacement, due to limitations imposed by the body construction, whether solid or hollow. However, it is sometimes desired to replace a defective pickup unit and/or associated controls, especially potentiometers which are subject to mechanical deterioration. Also, with advancing technology, it has become more frequently desired to replace the pickup unit with another that is new, improved and/or different, e.g. one having different timbral qualities. Such replacement is made difficult by the conventional practice in which the pickups and their associated components are spread out and interconnected over various locations on the instrument body, and are thus not only costly to assemble in initial production but also difficult and troublesome to service when the pickups themselves are mounted in an unserviceable recessed manner in the solid body, making removal and replacement difficult, time-consuming and expensive. Pickups and associated components that cannot be removed without first removing the instrument strings involve costly and time-consuming re-stringing and retuning.